The Dark Griffin Read Online Free PDF

and for days he stayed in his new home and gorged himself to his heart’s content. Caught up in this new-found bounty, he had completely forgotten about his mother.

    I t was a solid week before the store of food in the burrow began to run out. The chick grew fat and sleek with all this good food so readily available, and was thoroughly disinclined to wander far from his new home. He hadn’t given a thought to where the food had come from; it was just there, and he took all he wanted.
    At around the time that the heap of carrion started to run out, the chick was woken one day by an unfamiliar scent. He opened his eyes and realised that the entrance to the burrow was blocked. The smell filled his nostrils, dry, musky and dangerous.
    A moment later his eyes, adjusting to the gloom, showed him a brief vision of a huge, snarling muzzle, and then pain tore into his flank. He screeched and lashed out, and his talons hit something soft. The thing withdrew and he pulled himself further back into the burrow, still screeching loudly. There was blood on his flank, hot and clinging, but he had no time to feel sorry for himself. His assailant had withdrawn its head when he slashed at it, but it returned a moment later, teeth bared and snapping for him. He struck back, this time with his beak, and bit it on the nose.
    The creature—a pouched, foxlike predator with a striped back—pulled its yellowy head out of its plundered food store and the savage thing it contained and sat back on its haunches, whining. It shook its head and snorted, trying to clear the blood out of its injured nostrils, and then abruptly turned and left. Fighting the thing that had stolen its food simply wasn’t worth it.
    The griffin chick stayed where he was for some time, panting in his distress. His flank had three deep slashes in it, each one bleeding and painful. He nosed at them with his beak, quivering, and huddled back in the burrow, frightened that the creature might come back.
    It didn’t, but he barely slept for the next couple of days. His wounds eventually stopped bleeding and scabbed over, and he rested and ate the last few carcasses slowly, to give himself plenty of time to heal. One of the wounds became infected, but he nipped it open and let the muck drain out, and the swelling went down.
    The last of the food was gone in a few days, but the wounds on his flank were deep and began bleeding again if he moved. He lay still on his side and felt hunger gnawing at him. If he went into the open now he would be slow and vulnerable. If he stayed here, he would starve.
    The black chick was still young and his mind was still simple, but he was more than intelligent enough to understand the situation and how dire it was. But, as he lay there among the damp earth and listened to the sighing of the trees far above, determination hardened in his chest. He would not give up. He would survive. Nothing and nobody would ever take his life away from him. He promised himself this.

    T he black chick did not forget his resolution. He waited patiently in the burrow for as long as he dared, eating wet earth and insects to sustain himself, and then left it and struck out into the world once more.
    And he survived. Against all the odds, he survived. He ate worms; he ate carrion. He taught himself how to hunt small animals, which he did mostly at night, given an advantage by his dark coat. He raided birds’ nests and dug mice out of their burrows. Once he even resorted to fishing, waiting patiently by a still pool to snag his prey. He took to climbing into trees to sleep, feeling safer up high, and from these perches he continued his attempts to fly. He only managed a brief unsteady glide at first, and his landings were painful, but he persisted and taught himself how to keep steady and turn by using his tail. After a while he was able to flit from tree to tree and could land neatly on a branch or a rock or on the ground. He began chasing birds on the wing and even